Your Labor Day Weekend Pop Quiz

You’re the president of ABC Sprockets. Your customer base is growing but you can feel the heat of Spacely on your corporate neck.

Where’s the best place to spend you’re profits to avoid your customers moving to the Next Big Thing?

Put most of your money and time into R&D so you can continue to come up with cool stuff for your customers.

Put most of your time and money into building customer trust.

Put most of your time and money into building partnerships and joint ventures to sustain growth.

Spend your time thinking about your smart girlfriend.

The correct answer is obviously D.

here’s why-

It’s not that the other answers are necessarily wrong but the correct one is obviously D.

Smart girlfriends and smart companies both know what’s important.

Building subtle barriers to exit.

No one dates the girl cooing about marriage on the first date. Just like no one signs up for your product or service thinking they’ll have it for the rest of their lives. This is short attention span theater folks.

Now one of the big lies that marketing guys teach is that you have to build trust with your customers, just like people have in their real life relationships.

But if you really look at your long term relationships you’ll see that what they have in common isn’t trust.

Tons of people stay in marriages and keep friends they really don’t trust.

Nope, what these relationships really have are subtle but effective barriers to exit.

And your smart girlfriend is the perfect one to tell you how to set them up.

No one wants a girl cooing about marriage on the first date. But once your bank accounts are intertwined, she’s met your mom and her stockings are in your bathroom you’ll find she’s much harder to get rid of.

Smart companies do the same thing.

“Baby, we may as well have joint bank accounts…”

Smart companies billing you automatically every month.

“Why don’t we take a trip together in July…”

Smart companies call these frequent flyer miles.

“If you leave me I’m going to take you for every fucking penny you got!”

See cell phone companies.

I could go on but what would be the fun of that. Think of your own this holiday weekend for bonus points.